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Elevating the Fallen

Ivan Doig may not have pioneered Montana literature — that honor belongs to Lewis and Clark — but since “This House of Sky,” his memoir of growing up along the Rocky Mountain Front, was nominated for the 1979 National Book Award, Doig has been considered the literary equivalent of Gary Cooper, another of the Treasure State’s favorite sons: good and decent, emblematic of an honored past. Doig’s fiction is often labeled old-fashioned, but although he trades in nostalgia it’s rarely of the Hallmark variety. His McCaskill trilogy dissects the intricate relationship between a landscape — Montana’s Two Medicine country — and its colonizers. In “Bucking the Sun,” construction of the monumental Fort Peck Dam, begun in 1933, mercilessly displaces both water and tradition.

Like those novels, Doig’s new book, his 12th, takes its inspiration from yesteryear. (The author, in fact, has a Ph.D. in American frontier history.) In World War II, only New Mexico’s death rate outranked Montana’s, and among the fallen were 11 starting players from the Montana State College football team. In “The Eleventh Man,” Doig reimagines them as members of a fabled 1941 team at the fictional Treasure State University.

The novel opens in 1943 with the former teammates flung across a warring globe, from the Pacific Northwest to Guam, from Antwerp to New Guinea. The Threshold Press War Project, an armed services propaganda outfit, has ordered Ben Reinking, the team’s left end and son of a small-town newspaper editor, to write a series of articles called “The ‘Supreme Team’ on the Field of Battle.” Though the purpose of his task is never fully illuminated, Ben deploys, “lock, stock, and typewriter,” to profile his former teammates and, as instructed, elevate them to a hero status above what an athletic field might bestow.

Photo

Ivan DoigCredit
A. Wayne Arnst

The members of Doig’s cast speak an easygoing 1940s vernacular, more imagined, one hopes, than real. Soldiers drink “skunk juice,” receive the “galoot salute” and look forward to a “rub a dub dub.” “In bed and out, he was unbeatable company,” Ben’s inamorata, a female pilot, thinks of him, “bright as a mint silver dollar . . . a first-class passion ration.” (“And,” Ben says in return, “how baboon lucky I am to be with you.”) These incessant wisecracks overwhelm, yielding characters who become less individuals than accomplices in parody. As ever, Doig seems most comfortable with hushed descriptions of Montana’s landscape and its way of life. “Gros Ventre,” Ben reminds himself on a brief home leave, “was the same age as the tree rings in the mature cottonwood colonnade along its streets, and altered itself as slowly.”

As Ben visits his football buddies (a conceit that lends the plot a tidy arc) and as a colonel’s statistics (“In this war we are looking at a nine percent mortality rate for active combatants”) repeatedly fail to safeguard them, the novel emanates a sense of unavoidable ruin. And yet most of the fighting and the inevitable dying — what Ben labels “the creeping wall of oblivion” — occurs off the page. The narrative itself remains paradoxically peaceful.

The strength of “The Eleventh Man” comes in its exploration of larger subjects — the nature of heroism, and of propaganda. Which enlistee is more heroic, the one stationed in the remote reaches of the Pacific or the one fated to patrol the Washington coast? Ben is never sure whether he’s a victim or a perpetrator of the Army’s war of words, and he feels guilty about “dodging bullets from the teleprinter” rather than the real thing.

It is, nonetheless, an old-world sense of loyalty and duty — a Doig trademark — that keeps Ben and his comrades on guard. “The team and its mortal dangers were a mere handful compared to the innumerable slaughtered in the vaster jaws of war,” Doig writes of Ben’s assignment. “But they were his handful.”

THE ELEVENTH MAN

By Ivan Doig

406 pp. Harcourt. $26

Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Elevating the Fallen. Today's Paper|Subscribe